The morning I woke up viral

In February of 2014 I wrote something about my city. I wrote it earnestly and frantically, in one sitting, while most of the world was watching the Olympics. I posted it, shared it a couple of times, and went to bed.

By morning it had been read more than thirty thousand times. Twitter was mentioning me every few seconds. I staggered into a day of what people cheerfully call going viral, which is a very upbeat name for something that does not feel upbeat at all.

I wrote it out of grief. My neighborhood had absorbed one loss too many, and I was furious that it seemed to matter to no one with the power to change it. I was writing from exactly where I stood, which was one neighborhood, on one street, in a large and complicated city.

Two piles of mail

What came back arrived in two completely different streams, and only one of them was visible.

The public stream was the one everybody saw. Within a day I was not a person who had written something, I was a position. People were not responding to my paragraphs anymore, they were responding to what they had decided my paragraphs stood for. It got loud, and it got personal, and some of it came from places I would never want to be quoted by.

The private stream was the one nobody saw. People sent me flowers. They sent notes and gifts and long messages. Many of them lived in the neighborhoods getting hit hardest, and they were not angry that I had said something. They wanted more attention on it, not less. They wanted more help. That mail arrived quietly, for weeks, and almost none of it ever showed up in the public conversation about me.

Only one of those travels

That gap is the thing I still think about, twelve years later.

Outrage travels because it confirms a story somebody was already telling about sides. It slots neatly into us and them. A woman in Baltimore got a bouquet from a stranger who wanted the same things she wanted is not a story that serves anybody’s argument, so it does not move. The internet is very good at amplifying whatever divides and almost useless at amplifying whatever connects.

So if you are ever measuring the response to something you made by what you can see of it, know that you are reading a rigged sample.

The part that surprised me most

I have spent my whole life identifying with underdogs. I built a successful career and I am still a woman, still gay, still someone who assumed she was standing alongside the people getting the worst of it rather than across from them. Being cast as the other side was genuinely disorienting.

I also do not think it was only about what I wrote. I think a woman with a platform, and a successful one, attracts a particular kind of heat that has very little to do with the argument she is making. That was a new thing to learn about my own visibility, and I have never entirely unlearned it.

What I would tell someone before they publish

Not “don’t.” I still believe in publishing the thing you actually think, and I would write again. But go in knowing three things I did not know.

• You control the words and nothing else. Not the frame, not the headline someone puts on it, not the argument it gets drafted into once it leaves your hands.
• Agreement is not the same as support. Some of the people who cheer are cheering for reasons that have nothing to do with what you meant, and you cannot send it back.
• Write from where you actually stand anyway. Specific and personal is the only kind of writing that reaches anybody. It is also, by definition, one person’s view of a much bigger thing, so say it like one person, not like a verdict.

The practical version: I got a great deal more careful with my words. Not quieter. Careful. When something might travel, every sentence is doing more work than you think it is, and the ones you tossed off are the ones that get quoted.

Words matter. Sharing our experiences from our own unique, flawed, skewed and vulnerable places can trigger a conversation and a kind of growth that otherwise does not happen at scale.

I still believe that, which is why this piece makes me a little uncomfortable to publish. That is usually the sign it is worth saying out loud.